Henry James' The Jolly Corner: A Detailed Summary and Literary Analysis

The last of James’ ghost stories, written six years before his death, is widely considered his best, after “Turn of the Screw.” “The Jolly Corner” is rife with personal details: it was penned thirty-three years after James’ settlement in Europe, and three years after his first return to the United States since his decision to become an expatriate. During his decades abroad he had lost his favorite sister, a brother, and his parents, and the quaint, bourgeois New York that he had left was now a thundering metropolis marred by skyscrapers and occupied by slum dwellers and robber barons.

James found himself overwhelmed by the change, disturbed by questions, and haunted by self-doubt. He returned to Britain shaken and troubled: "If I were to live my life over again, I would be an American,” he said – probably as he was writing this story – "I would steep myself in America, I would know no other land. I would study its beautiful side. The mixture of Europe and America which you see in me has proved disastrous."

The story follows a man with a nearly identical problem: he too has been abroad for thirty-three years (an adulthood which confesses was “scandalous” – spent worshipping “strange gods” and wasting his talent and potential), has lost his family to death, and is left with their empty real estate and an old friend – a devoted woman who, waiting for his return, has never married or had a career of her own.

What would be an otherwise melancholic meditation on aging, time, and death takes an engrossing turn when the protagonist begins to sneak into the house at night, effectively haunting it – roaming the dark corridors for hours, sometimes putting his candle down and seeing how far he can go without it.

Fixated with the world of the past, memory, and imagination – the world of the Dead – he increasingly abandons the world of the present, sensation, and reality – the world of the Living – and begins to repeat the pattern of his life: running away from self-awareness.

Throughout the story – one with profound similarities to the “haunter-as-haunted” themes of “The Ghostly Rental” – the protagonist is obsessed with learning who he would have been had he stayed in New York with his family. An apparent knack for real estate has lead him and his dutiful friend to believe that he would have been a robber baron worth millions.

The chief mission of his haunting his family home – aside from a kind of sacrificial, ritualistic homage to his long-dead family – is to find this doppelgänger, whom he senses to be hiding in the house – a phantom of his could-have-been self. James weaves a brilliant psychological tale with impressionistic prose, proto-Jungian imagery, and foggy, almost therapeutic free associations.

Stalking the dark corridors of his childhood home, the middle-aged man appears to slip seamlessly into states of regression: imagining himself to be an archeologist probing the interior of the Great Pyramid, a brave game-hunter lurking through the jungle for a beast at bay (his elusive alter-ego), a predatory panther with empowering night vision, and a knight-errant confronted with a black-armored adversary at the threshold of a treasure.

But as his ramblings continue, his deeply held sense that he is flushing out the craven alter-ego who won’t dare show his face begins to weaken: he feels the brush of air on his neck, notices closed doors which had been opened and vice versa, and has the increasing sense that it is he, not the alter-ego, who is the prey – he, not the alter-ego, who stands to learn a lesson.

This parable of a man desperate to reconnect with his lost chances – lost family, lost childhood, lost friendships – fittingly has its foundations in James’ father, who was a theologian and a devotee to Emmanuel Swedenborg’s supernatural mysticism. Swedenborg’s philosophies “explored the unmanageable energies of nature and the extremes of human consciousness” One of Swedenborg’s more frightening theories was that of the “vastation” – a supernatural encounter with your dark alter-ego, your evil self – a demonic Id that attacks your areas of weakness and which must be defeated in order to assimilate the warring forces of the ego.

Henry James Sr almost had a mental breakdown when he experienced his vastation, calling it “a perfectly insane and abject terror, without ostensible cause, and only to be accounted for, to my perplexed imagination, by some damned shape squatting invisible to me within the precincts of the room, and raying out from his fetid personality influences fatal to life.”

Some scholars believe that in returning to New York, James the Younger believed that he had finally his own vastation from his own evil doppelgänger. Whether this is true or not, the following story has given readers and critics much to praise, but I suspect that it may ultimately have been an act of cathartic therapy for James – of mourning for his American Self, a person whom he never met but dearly wished he could.

SUMMARY

The story begins with Spencer Brydon’s return to New York City after thirty-three years abroad. Brydon had left America in his youth, abandoning business opportunities to live a life of leisure and art in Europe. Now middle-aged, he finds himself contemplating what might have become of him had he stayed in New York.

The question, “What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me? I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know!” preoccupies him

His confidante is Alice Staverton, an old friend who remained in New York. Brydon admits to her his strange obsession: he imagines a buried “alter ego” within himself, a version of his character that would have developed had he pursued the career of an American businessman.

 He likens this to a flower that never bloomed. Alice shares his speculation:

“And you wonder about the flower… So do I, if you want to know; and so I’ve been wondering these several weeks. I believe in the flower… I feel it would have been quite splendid, quite huge and monstrous.”

Brydon echoes her words: “Monstrous above all!” This imagined double soon becomes an object of fearful fascination for him. He declares: “He isn’t myself. He’s the just so totally other person. But I do want to see him… And I can. And I shall.”

II.

Brydon begins to spend his nights in his old family mansion on the “jolly corner,” a house he had left long uninhabited save for daily tending by a caretaker, Mrs. Muldoon. He makes these nocturnal visits in secrecy, timing them so that no one notices his absences. “It was a practice he found he could perfectly ‘work’ without exciting remark… even Alice Staverton… didn’t quite fully imagine.”

He finds a thrill in entering the great empty house, where each creak and echo awakens for him “the sigh… of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities.” In this atmosphere he feels close to conjuring the presence of his other self.

At first, his explorations are tentative. He lights candles and carries them slowly through the dark rooms, lingering in the shadows. He admits to Alice that his nightly wandering is like a form of hunting: “The terms, the comparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came again into play.”

He comes to feel that he himself produces dread—that he is the apparition, and that the “other” he stalks fears him as much as he fears it. His obsession deepens into a ritual of waiting and watching in the lampless dusk, when the old house becomes to him “the very jungle of his prey.”

III.

One night he finds a closed door in a part of the house he remembers leaving open. The discovery shocks him: “He took it full in the face that something had happened between—that he couldn’t have noticed before… Surely it had been subsequently closed!” He realizes another agent must be present. The closed door confronts him like a challenge: “Show us how much you have!”

For long moments he hesitates—should he open it? The tension resolves in a decision to retreat: “Discretion—he jumped at that… not because it saved his nerves or his skin, but because… it saved the situation.” He vows never again to try, sparing both himself and the other: “So rest for ever—and let me!”

Yet his surrender does not last. The silence of the house and the pull of his obsession draw him back. At dawn, while descending the staircase, he sees at the vestibule -- illuminated by the grey glow of early morning light coming through the transom -- a shadowy figure waiting.

The description is vague and terrifying: “The penumbra, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored sentinel guarding a treasure.” He knows this to be his alter ego, “the agent of his shame.”

At first its face is hidden by its own raised hands, “strong and completely spread,” one maimed with two fingers reduced to stumps. Dressed in evening clothes with “gleaming silk lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and polished shoe,” it bears Brydon’s stature and substance yet radiates a dreadful otherness.

The atmosphere is thick with suspense, the dim dawn casting a cold halo behind the figure, and Brydon feels both awe and horror: “Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to dismay.”

When the hands drop and the face is revealed, Brydon reels—it is at once his own and hideously unlike: “The bared identity was too hideous as his… The face, that face, Spencer Brydon’s?” Terrified, he retreats, sick with the force of its aggression, until the encounter overwhelms him and he collapses at the foot of the stairs.

The shock is too great: “It would send him straight about to the window he had left open… he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the street.” Instead he collapses in a swoon at the foot of the stairs.

IV.

Hours later, Brydon awakens to find himself tended by Alice Staverton. Mrs. Muldoon had discovered him unconscious, but Alice had already been searching for him, having sensed his peril. As he comes to himself, he murmurs: “What a long dark day!” and wonders, “Where have I been?”

Alice explains how she found him, and reassures him when he cries, “Ah but I didn’t! There’s somebody—an awful beast; whom I brought, too horribly, to bay. But it’s not me.” To this she answers gently: “No—it’s not you. No, thank heaven, it’s not you!”

He insists that he was meant to have known himself, but she comforts him: “You couldn’t!” She further reveals that in the “cold dim dawn” she too had seen him—though her words suggest a vision different from his monstrous double. Gradually, he realizes that Alice has been his salvation. “It must have been that I was [dead]… You brought me literally to life.”

She bends and kisses him, answering everything by her embrace. “And now I keep you,” she declares. He responds, “Oh keep me, keep me!” The story closes with Brydon held in her arms, clinging to the living comfort she offers.

ANALYSIS

Brydon’s journey into his past is an archetypal myth that calls to mind Carl Jung’s psychological theories and the literary criticism and myth studies of Joseph Campbell. There are three chief interpretations of this story, each concerning the identity of the doppelgänger, and all three involve a careful study of myth theory and the the so-called “hero’s journey,” derived from Campbell’s assertion that all stories have – deep in their core – the same basic plot: the monomyth.

Campbell, who was a student of Jung, (himself a student of Swedenborg and Freud), believed that all stories had the same twelve-step narrative that involves accepting a call to adventure from the Known World into the Unknown World, crossing a variety of thresholds (barriers, mountains, city gates, literal doors, forests, deserts, etc.), forming allies, adopting a mentor, resisting perils, coming to a shocking revelation (called the Abyss – a moment of literal or metaphorical death and rebirth), a transformation, an act of atonement, and a return to the Known World with a gift (a new insight, power, worldview, skill, or ability). So far, if we think carefully, this describes the story accurately.

Of course, sometimes these tales end tragically, and the gift may be a curse. We think of “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” Moby-Dick, and The Great Gatsby where the journey into the Unknown is survived by one character who returns “a sadder man but wiser now.” This is arguably Brydon’s experience as he returns to the Unknown World of new New York, and crosses the threshold into the haunted house. Brydon’s experience is one of peaks and valleys – the journey of a hero. He experiences almost manic-depressive shifts in perspective, ultimately seeking to flee the Living world of the present/experience/reality for the Dead world of the past/memory/imagination.

Like James, who claims to have regretted his rootless adulthood and longed to go back and time and live on one side of the Atlantic, Brydon has come to both revile and envy his alter-ego – this part of his identity that was starved of a future. He pitches between a predatory sense of wanting to track, pin, dominate, and vanquish his self-doubt, and a terrifying fear of being prey for the lurking power of his doppelgänger.

Like Dante, Christ, and Orpheus, Brydon descends into hell – perhaps literally, although this is purely open to interpretation – in search of his lost childhood, his lost family, and his lost life. Like Orpheus (and unlike Christ and Dante), he seems to clutch at it – to feel it – but ultimately has it torn away from him. When he confronts his Black Stranger, he has reached the Abyss – the moment of literal or metaphorical death – and is resurrected in Alice’s lap: an image which effortlessly calls to mind the Pieta: sculptures of the Virgin Mary cradling the martyred Christ in her lap. And in many respects Brydon is something of a Christ-figure, though mostly in his own mind. 

II.

This brings us to the psychological implications of Brydon’s Campbellian adventure. As I previously mentioned, Campbell was inspired by the work of Jung – previously a Freudian – who was himself a devotee of the 18^th century mystic and spiritualist Swedenborg. Henry James Sr. was a Swedenborgian, and like Brydon, experienced a moment in the Abyss. One night he nearly had a mental breakdown after encountering a “vastation” – a visit from his evil alter-ego, an encounter which purged him of spiritual perversity and pollution, leaving him clean to be reassimilated.

Freud would refer to this alter-ego – this primitive, selfish, bestial persona – as the Id, and Jung would characterize this persona as the Shadow. James gives it a similar characterization as the “black stranger.” In Jungian analysis, a figurative meet-and-greet with the Shadow has great potential for reconstruction of a fragmented Ego – a concept clearly related to Swedenborg’s vastation, an experience said to be unnerving, but which was ultimately a necessity for growth. One psychology website aptly summarizes the “encounter” phase:

“The encounter with the shadow plays a central part in the process of individuation. Jung considered that 'the course of individuation...exhibits a certain formal regularity. Its signposts and milestones are various archetypal symbols' marking its stages; and of these 'the first stage leads to the experience of the Shadow'. If 'the breakdown of the persona constitutes the typical Jungian moment both in therapy and in development', it is this which opens the road to the shadow within, coming about when 'Beneath the surface a person is suffering from a deadly boredom that makes everything seem meaningless and empty.”

The following stage after an encounter with the Shadow should be assimilation – a merger wherein the dark parts of one’s self are accepted, identified, incorporated, and thereby controlled. Alice does this on Brydon’s behalf by pitying the Black Stranger (though not without a heavy dose of sexual overtones, implications of fantasy/roleplaying, and suspect motives), but Brydon refuses, and this does not bode well for his development.

Like Henry James Sr., he has confronted his dark side, but unlike him, he refuses to accept it, denying their similarity until forced to by Alice. Brydon’s descent into the dark house – his unsolicited role as resident ghost – is particularly interesting psychologically. It is a practice in regression: his thoughts are peppered with boyish fantasies, boyish fears, and boyish bravado. He fancies himself a hunter, a panther, an explorer, a knight. He leaves the candle behind and tries to brave the dark. He dashes in and out of the house, pitching between childish fear and waggish arrogance. He is little more than the boy he was long ago, and in that respect, he is a ghost: frozen in time, refusing to own his negligence, and deeply mired in bouts of denial and regression.

It is telling that he never clues us into what made his father curse him, why he fled the country, why he has never returned until now, what “strange gods” he worshipped, and what “scandalous” adventures he had in Europe. Brydon wants to pretend that none of that happened – that he is still a boy playing “pirates” in the dark. His house symbolizes his mind: a compartmentalized structure filled will twisting corridors, shut doors, and hidden recesses.

His hero’s quest is to flush out the truth, confront it, identify it, mollify it, pacify it, and conquer. But he doesn’t. He hesitates to open the shut doors (read: to confront his repressed memories/feelings), and ultimately the phantom of the Truth must come to him, guarding the front door as if to say “that’s enough playtime for you – gallivanting all over the place like a damn child – you can’t leave here until you face me – face what you did – face who you are.” 

III.

And herein lie the promised three interpretations – interpretations informed by Campbellian myth theory, Swedenborgian theology, and Jungian psychoanalysis: firstly, the Stranger represents who Brydon would have become. Had he stayed in America he would have been a violent robber baron with a sick soul.

This is the traditional interpretation, but it has since been called into question by most critics for being too simplistic. Secondly, the Stranger represents who Brydon truly is. He is looking into a mirror like Dorian Gray or William Wilson, reviles what he sees, and is stunned into stupefaction and denial. Brydon is the Stranger. He is selfish, careless, and corrupt. He abandoned his family, abandoned Alice, and abandoned his potential.

Thirdly, the Stranger is what Brydon will now become. Having run to Alice (who can be accused of being a manipulative, passive-aggressive enabler) for maternal protection (note: James’ sister and sister-in-law were both named Alice, and his sister-in-law lived on Irving Street; there is certainly a cozy, feminine comfort in the name to James), she will stall his maturation and he will sour and rot in her overly protective embrace, not unlike Miles who is smothered by the governess’s (protective or punishing?) embrace.

Interpretations of Alice read her as both selfless and selfish, but overall, my impression is one of a woman who resents being abandoned, left a childless spinster, and is teeming with conflicting emotions: anger, love, a desire for revenge, a desire for closeness. She will now “have” Brydon and not let him go. He is hers now, and he will never be free again. Or is she his natural harbor? Is he home at last?

I find the most virtue in the second interpretation of the Stranger: Brydon is running away from the reality of his selfish life, and is traumatized by the lessons learned in the Abyss: that he is a near-sighted (read: self-absorbed), mutilated (read: spiritually blighted or undeveloped) monster (for commentary on the missing fingers and pince-nez, see the notes). 

IV.

This reading by its nature is more sympathetic to Alice – she was after all neglected by Brydon for 33 years – without making her a saintly martyr (more like someone with – as Jung would say – a Martyr Complex), or excusing her unavoidable possessiveness. Ultimately, in my reading, “The Jolly Corner” is a tragedy of mythic proportions, following a man who went on a spiritual quest for redemption and forgiveness, hoping to abate his fears, fortify his ego, and leave New York a happier, satisfied man.

His potential for growth is immense: he stands to identify and incorporate his dark side by acknowledging his selfishness, seeking the forgiveness of his departed family, and making things right in his world through the prescription of the Campbellian monomyth: call to adventure, crossing the threshold into the Unknown, facing challenges and forming alliances, finding a transfiguring revelation in the Abyss (confronting and assimilating his Shadow Self) in symbolic death to his old self and rebirth as a new man, transformation, atonement, and the ultimate return to the Known with a gift in tow.

Instead, Brydon claims to have been reborn – to have literally died and resurrected – but shows little sign of growth. Instead he is neurotic, flustered, and psychologically troubled. He rushes to Alice as a boy rushes to a mother proving that not very much has changed. Of course, he is now willing to accept Alice’s help, right? In my reading, this is not progress but regress: he has gone from adventurous boy to rebellious teen (for 33 years), and has fallen back into boyhood, and Alice is no closer to being his wife, for she has now become his Mother Mary.

James said that he was kept awake all night by the horror of this story before he wrote it. I don’t think we are often kept awake by the horror of happy endings.

You can read the original story HERE!

And you can find our annotated and illustrated collection of James' best ghost stories HERE!